1. Field of the Invention
This disclosure relates generally to software asset management, and, more particularly, to the use of fingerprints associated with copies of software applications to facilitate software license inventory management. The disclosure also relates to the use of tags to facilitate software asset management.
2. Description of the Related Art
For software licensees, managing and monitoring installed copies of software applications has long been problematic, particularly in enterprise environments where hundreds or thousands of copies of software applications may be installed. While most licensees want to stay in compliance with their relevant software licensees, the scale of typical enterprise deployments makes compliance difficult.
The problems faced by such licensees include accurately determining how many software assets are installed, determining when such assets were bought/installed (i.e., what software license agreement (e.g., Enterprise License Agreement, or ELA) is applicable to a particular asset), determining what rights are associated with certain assets, and determining whether the licensee's usage of these assets is under or over the amounts provided for in the applicable license agreements. Determination of what license agreement is applicable to a given copy of a software application is particularly problematic, since it is common for licensees to concurrently use copies of a given software application that are subject to multiple different license agreements.
The Symantec License Inventory Manager (SLIM), released in 2006, allows software licensees to locate and count copies of software applications and to determine license keys associated therewith. A given license key, however, can be associated with copies of software applications governed by multiple different license agreements. Furthermore, SLIM does not provide any information regarding applicable license agreements for copies of software applications that it locates.
In addition, the ever-increasing requirements to track software assets generally, because of economic or regulatory reasons, has led to the development of a variety of other software asset management tools. However, such tools may be very limited in their ability to track deployment and usage of software in a standard, systematic and logical fashion.